Lufthansa
Canvas Category OEM : Aerospace
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, commonly shortened to Lufthansa, is the flag carrier of Germany. When combined with its subsidiaries, it is the second-largest airline in Europe in terms of passengers carried. Lufthansa is one of the five founding members of Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, formed in 1997. Besides its own services, and owning subsidiary passenger airlines Austrian Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Brussels Airlines, and Eurowings, Deutsche Lufthansa AG owns several aviation-related companies, such as Lufthansa Technik and LSG Sky Chefs, as part of the Lufthansa Group. In total, the group has over 700 aircraft, making it one of the largest airline fleets in the world
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Lufthansa increases on-time flights by wind forecasting with Google Cloud ML
The magnitude and direction of wind significantly impacts airport operations, and Lufthansa Group Airlines are no exception. A particularly troublesome kind is called BISE: it is a cold, dry wind that blows from the northeast to southwest in Switzerland, through the Swiss Plateau. Its effects on flight schedules can be severe, such as forcing planes to change runways, which can create a chain reaction of flight delays and possible cancellations. In Zurich Airport, in particular, BISE can potentially reduce capacity by up to 30%, leading to further flight delays and cancellations, and to millions in lost revenue for Lufthansa (as well as dissatisfaction among their passengers).
Machine learning (ML) can help airports and airlines to better anticipate and manage these types of disruptive weather events. In this blog post, we’ll explore an experiment Lufthansa did together with Google Cloud and its Vertex AI Forecast service, accurately predicting BISE hours in advance, with more than 40% relative improvement in accuracy over internal heuristics, all within days instead of the months it often takes to do ML projects of this magnitude and performance.
How Lufthansa Technik Uses 3D Printed Tools to Manufacture Escape Route Markings
Lufthansa Technik AG, a subsidiary of the Lufthansa Group, not only takes care of maintenance and repairs in the aviation sector, but also sells aviation products and aircraft components to large original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), such as Airbus and Boeing. One of these product lines is escape-route markings for the interior of aircraft, which are produced in an innovative way with the help of 3D printed manufacturing aids.
In an interview with Ulrich Zarth, project engineer at Lufthansa Technik AG, we talked about how the company uses these 3D printed tools as consumables in production and how 3D printing makes process optimization more flexible.